


Songs of Innocence and of Experience

by kvikindi



Category: Captain America (Movies), Marvel Cinematic Universe
Genre: Gen
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2014-09-14
Updated: 2014-12-27
Packaged: 2018-02-17 09:18:49
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 4
Words: 5,516
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/2304593
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/kvikindi/pseuds/kvikindi
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Scenes from the long war, based on a series of prompts.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Howard & Peggy

**Author's Note:**

> Thanks to [morgan-leigh](http://morgan-leigh.tumblr.com), [spiderfire47](http://spiderfire47.tumblr.com), and [magickedteacup](http://magickedteacup.tumblr.com) for the prompts!

"Well," said Howard. "I certainly wouldn’t say no."

"You’re an engineer, Dr. Stark. I suspect you’re familiar with binary code. Either one thing or the other. If not yes, then no. If not no, then…"

"I didn’t say that."

Ice shifted in Howard’s snifter, losing form as it moved towards its liquid state. The pure gold tone of the single malt whisky turned weaker. Howard drank too much these days. Peggy had started tracking the bottles. It was simple, since mostly he slept in the office, though he had a home, not just the place on Park, but a lavish stone-heap somewhere upstate. He had homes everywhere, really, Howard. She’d visited some. Each one seemed cleaner and more expensive. She was reminded of dollhouses she had seen.

_You need a wife_ , she’d said once.

_Are you volunteering?_

_I’m afraid I’m taken._

_Renounce your vows. Run away with me._

Her instinctive response had been rather snide, but she’d bitten it back when she’d seen his face. He looked like a man tied down to a rail track, or perhaps with his foot trapped firmly in place. She’d wanted to ask what he thought the train was. But: better not, she’d thought; better not to know; after all, she had a job to do. She’d smoothed her hand through his hair very gently, a wordless way of saying: _no escape_.

And now: this golden-headed boy, some congressman’s or diplomat’s aide, his eyes resting just a little too long on the glass. It wasn’t even the right kind of glass for whisky. That said something, Peggy thought, something they didn’t want him seeing. She shifted, moved to block his sightline. Stared at him levelly.

A conciliatory smile. His teeth were very white and even. “The war’s been over for a long time.”

Peggy said, “Maybe your war.”

"It’s a new era. You’re a futurist, Dr. Stark."

"In my darker moments," Howard said. "I try not to be." He was staring at the desktop, at the papers on it. Zola. Strughold. Strucker. Rudolph. The faces of Germany. Black and white photos. He touched one with a finger. Condensation dripped from his hand, from the glass.

"The benefits we’ve seen with other institutions have been—" the golden boy spread his hands— “extraordinary. Isn’t it better to have the brightest minds in the world on our side?”

Peggy struggled to keep her voice even. “Arnim Zola is not a bright mind.”

"We can’t let petty prejudices keep us from what might be a world-changing opportunity. Dr. Zola has been an enthusiastic cooperator—”

“—Oh, I’m sure he has—”

“—and after all, Dr. Stark, Miss Carter: we all want the same thing.”

"I doubt that very much," Peggy said, but the boy said: "Peace in our time. You have children, Miss Carter; do you want them cowering under desks? Dr. Stark?"

"I don’t have children," Howard said. His expression was something unreadable. Peggy, looking at him, was struck by a surge of unwelcome compassion. She wanted to protect him, yet she felt she could not. There were too many other tasks in her life: other priorities, other demands. _In a perfect world,_ she thought, _you wouldn’t get hurt._ But theirs was not a perfect world, and it was all that they had. She had no choice, and anyway, she supposed, in many ways it was too late. He had been hurt; they both had been.

"Dr. Stark and I will discuss the offer," she told the golden boy. "Tell your ringmaster, your hall monitor, whoever it is: we’ll call."

His smile had chilled. “Dr. Stark?”

Howard said, “Yes.”

The golden boy said, “I’ll tell them you didn’t say no.”

His eyes and Howard’s met.


	2. Howard & Peggy

"No, Rogers," said Col. Phillips.

Peggy watched as Steve got that look on his face, that sulky little pugilist frown. She’d no idea what he’d asked for, but she was sure he’d get it; that was the problem with Steve: he always did. You could tell him no, and he’d accept the answer— very polite, Steve. But as soon as you left, he’d be off to obtain what he wanted, regardless of your opinion. It was a very American way of working— one which, she’d found, she could respect, but which required rather a lot of damage control. She sighed now and prepared herself to do it.

It was always the same conversation, with small variations: “Perhaps I might assist Captain Rogers…” “The general is quite right, but I wonder if…” “I’m sure Mr. Stark could devise a suitable option…” “Let me speak to Captain Rogers; we won’t take up your time.” No one could fault Steve’s intelligence, but for some reason he seemed to think that truth was the best option, always, and always so much of it.

Later, when the wounds had been plastered over, when all the frayed tempers had been hemmed, she tried to tell him. They were seated in the commissary, drinking pale liquid that purported to be tea. She said, “Your life would be much easier, you know, if you could accept that truth is not absolute.”

He blinked at her— those long fair eyelashes— clearly bewildered. “Excuse me?”

"The truth, Steve. You don’t always have to tell it."

She saw the pout of the frown begin. She sighed. Perhaps a different tack. “Do you think I’m beautiful, Steve?”

"Of course!" —His eyes alarmed now, as though he’d been ambushed and was very faintly panicking.

"And do you think my hair simply grows like this? Or that my eyes look like this without mascara?"

It was clear that he had never considered the matter.

"It doesn’t. They don’t," she told him. "Does that horrify you?"

"No, of course not." And, of course, he was telling the truth. He couldn’t help it. "There’s a difference," he said.

"Between… what?"

"You’re not disguising yourself. It’s not a lie."

"It’s a kind of lie."

"But you’re beautiful," he said. "That could never change."

Oh, she thought— how to explain. It seemed to her that truth was a very different kind of notion for women than it was for men. Men thought of truth like a thing in a box: you only had to unwrap it. Better yet to dispense with the paper and ribbon, the box itself. No wonder they liked women naked. Men were the great uncoverers of beauty, the great dismantlers of artifice. For Howard Stark, the human brain amounted to a circuit. (He had tried several times to explain this theory, apparently thinking it was likely to get her into bed.) Women, on the other hand… well, Peggy was quite prepared to accept the brain as a circuit, but this did not help her to understand the mind of Himmler. The mind of a man who wanted to hurt her, who wanted to hurt her countrymen. Certainly there was truth, but why ought it be in the body? Why ought it be something one could diagram? What was so truthful about the body? —A set of clothes that one could never take off, a box that could never be opened.

And they lived in an era of shape-changers, now; God help them all. Steve, of any man, should understand this.

His face was stricken with worry now. It was so easy to read him, just like a book. Blake, she thought— something hand-illustrated. Something that, on first glance, looked like a children’s rhyme, but had secret layers. She reached out and covered his hand with her own. He wanted so badly to be good to her, to be, simply, good. It was hard not to feel fond. “You’re very kind,” she said. “And I know you mean it.”

"Of course I do."

"We must go to an art museum, after the war. Someplace that’s meant for discussing truth and beauty. We can start a fight over the Elgin Marbles."

"We will," he said. He was smiling now. "That sounds good."

After the war: when they would live forever.

***  
She thought that, at the last, he’d understood what she meant.

***

Still, she considered it more, as she grew older. As life became more complex.

She considered it watching Howard with his baby on his shoulder: a little, damp, unhappy-faced chit. The baby, not Howard, though he looked wretched. Poor Howard, she thought. Would he teach the baby about circuits? She supposed he would. She was sure he’d be very straightforward, laying out the facts and logic. But you couldn’t do that with children. The truth was a betrayal; you had to tell them fables. _You’ll always be safe; the world’s a good place; I will love you forever_. Who would tell the chit this?

Howard’s company was profiting from the war. The world had grown ever more violent, or perhaps only when compared to their vision. It pays the bills, Howard said, but it did rather more. He didn’t enjoy it. Peggy watched him not-enjoying it through three bottles of whisky at Christmas: another year, they’d survived, they were living forever. The TV was all still bombs in the jungle, children screaming with burns on their skin. Someone had told her a statistic, the number of total rounds fired to kill one foreign soldier. It was in the tens of thousands. “To peace,” Howard said, raising his glass. “Peace in our time.”

And that was the problem, wasn’t it? Howard thought that peace would descend from above, perhaps like Jehovah’s angel, absolving him; or perhaps it would be found somewhere in the desert. _How could we have missed it_ , they’d say; _we’ve been looking so long, for all these years, and here it is_ … But peace didn’t work like that. It wasn’t an arrangement of atoms that somewhere, somehow existed. You had to carve it into being. It took your life’s work. She remembered Steve, with a blending stump in his hand; the men whose lives he had effaced, the goodness she had seen in him. God, it was so tangled. She didn’t know how to do it. Once, she thought, once she had; but then, things were simpler at their beginnings.

Her own children were growing up. She missed their infant bodies, so close to being of her flesh; defenseless, yet so defensible. They’d been unable to speak, only absorb her stories. They hadn’t even had nightmares yet. Now she could not save them from every danger by scooping them up and cradling them. They were older, taller, brash and careless, strangers with American accents. She still told them lies, and she feared for them always. She’d wanted so much to give them a good world, and too late, she’d realized goodness wasn’t a gift. She would have given them everything, everything, if she could’ve.

Howard called his child a little chain reaction. With discomfort, as though afraid of what he’d set in motion. Peggy looked at the baby’s tiny fist, clutched around Howard’s index finger as though around a gunstock. She too felt a sense of dread, an inability to see the child’s future. Everything was flying apart now, dissolving into component threads, the pattern no longer intelligible. _Howard_ , she wanted to say:  _lie to him_.


	3. Steve & Bucky

Steve tried not to count the days since they’d returned to New York. Whenever he did, days became hours: a huge number, a huge expanse of time, exhausting: the weight of them, the history of a world hewed out of pain. He did better when he thought about each day as different.

For a while, Bucky didn’t want to stop moving. But he didn’t like the creak and flash of the subway trains— the sparks from the third rail green and ghostly between the stations, in the dark, and _N_ _o no no_ he’d breathed, hunching in his seat, hands over his head— so they walked, most days, or rode the Hudson Line north out of the city. It was amazing how soon you could be in green country, the river running like a rich and tranquil line, streets lined with narrow, well-kept houses.

They went to Sleepy Hollow and saw no ghosts. They went to a festival where everything was apple-themed: apple donuts, apple dumplings, apple wine. You could buy apples dried and carved like jack o’lanterns, with a little candle set inside: so fragile that Steve was scared to touch them.

Bucky wasn’t scared. Bucky liked to touch things. Ordinary objects: coffee cups, lightbulbs, a plate glass window, the lintel of a doorway, the collar of a shirt. In the city, they’d go to the Greenmarket sometimes, and he’d pick out vegetables that looked like gems. Purple carrots, blood-red beets, painted squash, considering their weight, resting each of them in his hands. Pears that could have come from a Renaissance painting.

Steve didn’t know what was going on in his head. He didn’t talk much, and how could you ask— how could Steve ask— ? Without sounding like a tourist in a foreign country, one whose rules and customs were unknown to him.

_I’m not,_ he thought, _I’m not_ — more than once, and had to turn away and clench his fists.

He was. He needed a map. He needed a guidebook.

***

Bucky hadn’t wanted to stop moving, but moving didn’t seem to make him happy. At least, he’d shown no outward sign of it. How would Steve know? Happiness wasn’t something he’d thought he could speak of, known how to speak of, till he met Sam; nothing had ever made him think that it might be required of him. —And, see, still: something required. He knew that wasn’t the language. But sometimes with Sam he felt guilty; even with Tony, sometimes, with others. He felt they’d issued an order, and he couldn’t fulfill it. It required a skill set he didn’t have.

He didn’t want to do that to Bucky.

Besides, they were— it was _like_ being happy, this sight-seeing, this not-fighting, wasn’t it? He’d told Hill he was on call, but to take the reins, and it was like a vacation. He hadn’t hurt anyone in a very long time, and that seemed good, he liked that. Bucky didn’t have to hurt anyone.

So they kept moving.

***

They walked to Fort Tryon Park, out to the Cloisters. On the far shore of the Hudson, the leaves were turning red. Children played along the path, waving plastic swords. Bucky, at the museum, stared at the images of martyred saints. Somehow Steve hadn’t expected so much violence. Or: not violence, he thought, though— suffering. There was a difference, and he knew it, though he’d never thought about it. He looked at Christ, at the Virgin holding His body. You could see His skeletal ribs in the wood. Steve went out into the garden. The air was cold. After a moment, Bucky followed him.

They stood looking at the neat, marked beds of herbs.

"It’s not," Bucky said. "…a. Real building."

"Sure it is," Steve said. "We’re here, aren’t we?"

He didn’t want to say, _I don’t understand what you mean._

Bucky said, “But. They put it together. Out of other buildings.”

It explained, in the little paper brochure, how different parts of abbeys had been shipped from all over Europe. In New York, an architect had put them together: embedding fragments in walls of new stone, laying old stone onto sturdier brick. The building was a kind of patchwork creation. You might walk through a twelfth century Spanish door into a French hall from the fourteenth century.

Steve said, “Everything’s gotta come from somewhere. Part of me came out of a machine.”

He realized his mistake, then, but didn’t know how to fix it. Bucky didn’t say anything.

***

Steve started having nightmares, but he didn’t know why. It had been a while since he found out about Bucky. He didn’t remember much about them, just the feeling of terror, and pain in his wrists, like he was pulling at chains. His throat sometimes felt raw in the morning, and he knew it was from screaming.

"You can—" Bucky said once, without looking at him. "At night. I can. Hear you."

Steve didn’t know what to say to that.

They walked to Brooklyn, by way of Chinatown, over the Manhattan Bridge. Bought mamoul from a Lebanese grocer and ate them, the cookies crumbling softly, as they wandered farther out. Past the Navy Yard, towards Prospect Park, through Fort Greene.

Steve asked, “Where are we going?”

***

Out at Brighton Beach, they got in a brawl with some gangsters. Nothing serious: a couple of Ukrainian toughs, one of whom had hit his girlfriend on the boardwalk. She was a slip of a thing, in spindly heels and an outsize leather jacket, shouting at Steve to _Stop, stop stop!_ He stopped, because he didn’t know what else to do.

"Why would you," Steve said, breathing hard, "why would you hurt her? You don’t have to hurt anyone; why would you want to hurt someone?"

The boy looked at him, pale eyes uncomprehending. A blow to the mouth had left his lip cut. He wiped away the blood and spat something in Ukrainian. Steve didn’t even know if he spoke English, didn’t know if he’d understood.

The boardwalk emptied. It was a bad day for it anyhow. The sky above the sea was gray, so low that the world felt claustrophobic.

Bucky hunched his shoulders, shaking out his fist. He hadn’t been ambidextrous before, but now he could choose which hand to fight with. He’d fought the Ukrainians with his right hand.

"Sorry," Steve said.

Bucky said, “I don’t mind.” He took a quick breath and tipped back his head, shutting his eyes. Steve couldn’t read his expression. But there was something, something there, a hint of emotion.

"Bucky, do you want to," he began. Then couldn’t think how to continue. After a pause he shook his head.

They kept walking. It seemed like the beach went on forever. Like in the whole world, there was only the sea and the sand, and they were alone with it. Steve knew things lived in the water, even in this water, under the surface, but it was hard to believe when you couldn’t see them moving. The ocean might have been plate glass. From time to time he’d see a break in the water and think, for a second, that it was a fin— dolphins and whales did make it this far. But it always turned out to be a wave.

On the way home, they bought bags of Russian candy. It came wrapped in foil with exotic pictures on it: pictures of castles and deserts and snow-capped mountains, islands and tundras, places they had been.

***

"So we got this call," Tony said.

Steve said, “I’m on vacation.”

"Uh-huh. Yeah. Sure seems like it."

Which made Steve mad, because what did he know? What did he know about it? He supposed that when Tony went on vacation, he took a private jet to a tropical island, to someplace foreign. Steve didn’t know how to explain that there was no place as foreign as New York, these days, felt to him.

Still, he regretted the conversation two days later, in Central Park, when Hydra attacked them.

Bucky was sitting on the edge of Bethesda Fountain, gazing up at the Angel of the Waters through sunglasses. It was a cold day, and the park smelled like autumn: like things drying up, going underground, like dead leaves and red brick. Bucky dipped one hand into the water, and then out of nowhere: gunshots, a knife in his shoulder.

This time he fought with his left hand, Steve observed, spinning the shield out mechanically. (He’d tried— but he couldn’t leave it; couldn’t feel safe without it, so he’d had a portfolio made to fit.)

Bucky had pulled the knife out of his shoulder and was wielding it with ease, ignoring the blood that was soaking his jacket. Steve felt— he— a Hydra soldier came near, and he kicked the man down. A rib cracked beneath his boot. It was satisfying— not the pain in the man’s face (he betrayed none), but the fact that— he could pin that man down, he could protect Bucky—

Bucky slammed a man’s head on the side of the fountain. He had moved into a kind of dance with Steve, one that they had never practiced. Duck; weave; matching blows. Steve had known how to do this, once, with Bucky. The motions of it were not the same. But some architecture persisted underneath.

There was a rush, a joy, to moving so quickly, to no longer having to hold in his strength. It burst out of him like— he didn’t know what. Like all the words he had stopped up were loose. Like he was back at home in his body.

Bucky held the last man’s head under water until he stopped struggling. He looked up— Bucky— there was blood on his lip, and his eyes were bright—

For once, Steve thought: Bucky looked happy.

***

There had been some turning they missed, some point on this journey at which it was still not quite too late. They could’ve stopped, then, and gone back to their lives. Married, had kids, moved out of the city; maybe to California, like the Dodgers. Bucky had talked about going West, some— he had a thing for the Hollywood dames— and Steve thought he would probably follow. He could’ve traded his bike for a small sedan, learned to tend a lawn. They’d have sat in the shade, listening to the sprinklers run, listening to the children shriek as they played, and maybe once in a while one of them would have asked, “Say, do you remember, back in the war…?”

But they hadn’t seen it, so they went careening on, not knowing the sacrifice that they’d made.

***

Steve slept better, after, for a while. He no longer had the same dreams.

Bucky, too, seemed more restful. “I don’t hear you anymore,” he explained.

Steve had never asked what Bucky dreamt of. He made no noise in his sleep.

"Do you maybe—" Steve asked. "Do you maybe want to spar?"

He’d been told that he shouldn’t broach this topic. The thought of Bucky armed and fighting filled Hill with unease. Tony, too, Steve would guess. But he thought maybe it was a good idea.

They fought for a few hours. They were evenly matched: Steve’s superior strength and speed against Bucky’s arm and his single-mindedness. He seemed determined not to notice discomfort, or maybe had lost the ability. Steve pinned him twice; once, Bucky threw him. Steve was surprised to find himself laughing— winded, but laughing, flat on the mat.

Bucky stared at him suspiciously. “Nuts,” he pronounced. But his mouth was twitching.

Steve wondered if Bucky felt like he felt, too big for the world, or in different ways. Sometimes it seemed like everything around him was the wrong tensile strength and weight. Every single object was waiting to be broken. Not just physically, but on some deeper level. He spent so much of his life afraid, and now— “Come on,” he said. “You’re not gonna hurt me.”

Bucky took him down almost at once, but didn’t get up. Instead he stayed, holding Steve’s wrists to the floor. His grip was very tight, bordering on painful. His eyes were wide. “I’m not—" he said. "I’m not, I don’t— I will. I’ll hurt you.”

Steve said. “I promise, you can’t.”

He kicked up, and they rolled, tumbling backwards, knees and elbows digging in where they could, quick huffs, eventually, of breathless laughter, and it was good, it was so good. They had never, ever played like this as children. Now it was as though they were children again, a second childhood for this strange future, for their new bodies, for everything they hadn’t known. For everything that would happen to them.

When he paused, grabbing a quick gasp of air, he saw that Bucky’s eyes were wet. He’d never seen Bucky cry before. It made him draw back. “Buck?” he said uncertainly.

"Fine—" Bucky said, "I’m— fine.” He exhaled. His voice was unsteady. “Can we just. Stay here? For a while?”

"Yeah, of course. Of course we can." He started to roll onto the mat beside Bucky; before he could, to his surprise, Bucky half-tackled him, shoving his face against his shoulder. It was at once a gentle and an oddly feral gesture. He could feel the wetness of Bucky’s breath, the shaky rush of every exhale. His fingers dug into Steve’s biceps. Steve felt he was holding a cat or a child, yet at the same time, it was Bucky; it had always been Bucky, unmistakable, in every form that he took.

He wanted to say, _You’re safe now_ , but that was not what Bucky wanted; he wanted to say, _I’m safe now,_ but that wasn’t true. They were not, had not wanted to be safe people. They were people who could hurt and be hurt, and that seemed like more than he’d ever expected. That was enough for him not to move, for him to curl his hand at the nape of Bucky’s neck— like his dangerous hands could ever be shelter, like his body had been made to shield and not to do what it had been made to do. Like Bucky himself had been made to take shelter. And yet here he was, home at the last. Both of them fractured and salvaged, made new.


	4. Howard & Peggy, 1945

 

Stark comes back to London on a Monday morning.

It’s springtime, much to Peggy’s surprise. Where, where has the wintertime got to? She sees snow every time she closes her eyes. She’s hardly noticed the changing of seasons. There must be seasons, even in war, surely. But what she’d seen of Austria had been factories and prison camps, with hardly a hint of what seemed like life. The months passed. Transports rattled on melting roads. It wasn’t that everything around her had died, but rather that it seemed to keep on dying. The war hadn’t ended when it had ended. There was nothing she could point to, a neat line: on this side war, on the other side, not. Refugees came from the east, men and women and children. Her troops tried, where they found them, to keep them alive, but they couldn’t always. There was too much damage. It’s so hard to keep a body alive. It seems easy, until you actually have to do it; it seems like what the body’s made for, like an object in motion: life soaring onwards without any effort. It’s not like that, though. It takes so much labor.

When she got back to England, the landscape had blossomed. There was green on the trees, flowers in the gardens. For three days she sat in a room and didn’t cry. She felt that she had arrived in the wrong country. She was a stranger here. So where could she go, then? There was nowhere, nowhere on earth.

Stark rings her, wants to meet, and she says, “Yes, all right, then.”

He’s been in the Arctic for some indeterminate time. No phone calls. One letter, sent, apparently, from some place in Norway. She’d imagined a land composed of ice. Like an England cut right out of the glaciers. It hadn’t seemed such an unpleasant prospect. The nights were long, Stark wrote, and very cold. He was testing some advanced form of radar. He had so far picked up no signs of life.

He has changed, when she sees him. He’s thinner and paler. His eyes rest on her, but she can’t read them. It’s always been hard for her to read Howard. She thinks there’s a lot of him happening inside. All she gets is a sense of the tumult. Now, perhaps, slightly muted, exhausted.

"How was the Arctic?" she asks him.

He says, “Full of ice.”

They don’t shake hands. They don’t touch each other.

Stark’s staying at the Savoy, so they’d met close to the river. By some unspoken agreement, they stay in motion. They walk along the Embankment for a while. It’s evening, and the sun moves strangely on the water. The city before them is spiked and full of shadows.

"How are you," Stark says at last. "I mean. How have you been."

"Busy. I’ve been busy."

"I talked to Phillips."

"He put me on leave."

"He said you needed it."

Peggy rests her arms against a railing. “I don’t think,” she says, “that I really did.”

"Maybe that’s how you know you really need it. Like being nuts— the really nuts ones will say they’re not nuts."

"Or else they spend two months sailing the Arctic."

He lights a cigarette, offers one to her. “Point taken.”

They smoke in silence as the sun sets.

"What will you do now?" Peggy asks. "Are they sending you somewhere?"

"New Mexico. Classified. Middle of the desert."

"Sounds dreadful."

He shrugs. “Can’t be worse than this.”

"No," she says. "It can’t. Can it."

Their eyes meet. They both know that it could; and yet, on another level, it can’t really. Whatever it will be, it will be work. Perhaps the desert will be much like the Arctic, much like the churned up Austrian routes, where the tanks had turned all the earth to one color. It will not be a boarding-house or the Savoy. It won’t be the laughing girls on the buses, the green in the parks and the birds on the river, the children playing games you can’t quite understand, games that have changed so much since you were a child that never, never again can you play them. No. It will be very clean, and very sterile.

"What about you?" Stark says.

"They want me out, of course— ladies back to the home front— but I won’t let them."

"No, not really your style, huh. You could come to New Mexico," he offers. "Hey, we could get married! That’d solve some of our problems, for sure."

She can roll her eyes, because he’s not serious. Half-serious, at most. But at the same time she feels oddly close to tears. She’s not going to marry anyone else, she thinks. Or, all right, perhaps she will; that’s quite dramatic. Who knows what might lie in the future? But it won’t be the marriage of those two selves, the infant union she’d begun to imagine. She had carried that hope like a child in her body, had felt it fail to come to term.

They hadn’t even been lovers, she and Steve. They hadn’t touched each other even that much. There had always been this distance between them. Elusive, he’d always slipped out of her fingers, right out of her reach, moving on… or maybe they had both been reaching towards something. Their fingers had brushed, in the midst of that motion, and now he had somehow raced on ahead. The object remained: desirable, distant. Like a compass, she is oriented towards it.

She asks Stark: “Can you really imagine it? Getting married?”

"To you?"

"To anyone."

He shrugs, faux-casual. His look is cryptic, restless. “I don’t know.”

"Nor me. I suppose…" Her gaze roams the horizon. All the little rooftops of low London, under the broad sky with its network of stars. "I’m married already, in a way."

"To… ?"

"No, of course not. But— to something, you know. For my life. Anyone else would play second fiddle."

She feels him beside her. A steady presence. Strange, that she should take such comfort from him. She’d known, though, when she saw him, and maybe before, when he hadn’t come home from the Arctic. That in some way, importantly, he was the same. One dream had died, but there was this other: less human and larger. A seasonless dream. It would never die; it would never flower, only to die…

She’s tired suddenly.

"I’ll see you again," she says. "Don’t worry. You won’t have to say goodbye." He hates that.

"You sure?"

"I feel full of prophecy."

And she is. How could they not once more be entangled? The world’s too small, too small for them and the dream. That’s what’s tiring, the terrible surety of it. The resignation, the glimpse that she sees of the long road ahead, the width of the river, and so much— she knows— so much suffering. She can’t stay here, though. Amongst the little flowers.

She tilts her head and looks up at the moon— just appearing, that lovely and desolate object.

"Good luck," she says. "In New Mexico. Be safe. And Howard— don’t do anything that I wouldn’t do."

He laughs: a quick breath. “I’ll keep that in mind.”

They don’t touch in parting. So little touching in her life. She wants suddenly, quite badly, to wrap her arms around him. Something less remote: their hearts, lungs, ribs closer together, some shared warmth against the winter inside. But she can’t, of course, bring herself to do it. So she watches him go. The night is still warm. But she wraps her arms around her shoulders, shivering anyhow.

**Author's Note:**

> I'm on [tumblr](http://septembriseur.tumblr.com).


End file.
